crazyharry wrote:There are no arenas and no plans to include arena, which is a mixed blessing. Bribing people into arena by making the best gear come from there only was a terrible idea on Blizzards part, I only ever met 1 person who did arena for fun, everyone else did it to gear up so they could survive more than a few seconds in BGs (not implying there were not lots of people who enjoyed arena as there obviously were)I served my time pillar humping s2-5 and have no desire to return to it.But it is also a shame that the people who liked it dont have that option, question is, would an arena without best in slot gear rewards be popular enough.

I would rank Arenas as one of the things I enjoyed the absolute most about WoW but I really don't think it would so well in SWTOR.

2v2 would make WoW look like the most balanced PvP ever due to Tank/DPS Hybrid & Heal/DPS hybrids rolling w/ taunt spams, guard, bubbles & HoTs being the ONLY viable team. For example my guildy and I run that in voidstar and we can not only survive but kill up to 5+ DPS focusing on either 1 of us due to just how crazy the synergy is.

If they were to only have maybe a 4v4 Arena I think it "Might" work. Truthfully I don't think there would be any real difference in group comp tho.

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Barathorn wrote:I love the fact that DPS meters aren't more important than the gameplay and not standing in shit.

Honestly, I wish that a damage meter were available for all MMOs, and even single player games like Amalur or Borderlands. It's often abused to belittle other players, but at the same time it's tremendously helpful as a tool to recognize when I can play my class better. Ostensibly, every class has a DPS tree, and I'd like to ensure that I'm not a liability to my team by playing the jedi knight's single-sword DPS tree. (OK, actually, I'd roll Shadow. I think I've been converted, if I ever buy the game.)

Is there a combat log, at least, that lets one do postmortem logs of dps?

Barathorn wrote:That is purely personal taste Sabin and isn't true for every server from my experiances [EU Based]. While in general Empire is the more played faction [EU] there are several strong Republic servers and several where the balance is about the same.

Barathorn wrote:I love the fact that DPS meters aren't more important than the gameplay and not standing in shit.

Honestly, I wish that a damage meter were available for all MMOs, and even single player games like Amalur or Borderlands. It's often abused to belittle other players, but at the same time it's tremendously helpful as a tool to recognize when I can play my class better. Ostensibly, every class has a DPS tree, and I'd like to ensure that I'm not a liability to my team by playing the jedi knight's single-sword DPS tree. (OK, actually, I'd roll Shadow. I think I've been converted, if I ever buy the game.)

Is there a combat log, at least, that lets one do postmortem logs of dps?

You know, now that i'm playing dps a bit, I'd love that, at least for my own self. Nothing irritates me more than "I think I did well", without being able to really compare against something else. You know, like Mario Kart Ghosts of your past top runs?

When that day comes, seek all the light and wonder of this world, and fight.

Barathorn wrote:I love the fact that DPS meters aren't more important than the gameplay and not standing in shit.

Honestly, I wish that a damage meter were available for all MMOs, and even single player games like Amalur or Borderlands. It's often abused to belittle other players, but at the same time it's tremendously helpful as a tool to recognize when I can play my class better. Ostensibly, every class has a DPS tree, and I'd like to ensure that I'm not a liability to my team by playing the jedi knight's single-sword DPS tree. (OK, actually, I'd roll Shadow. I think I've been converted, if I ever buy the game.)

Is there a combat log, at least, that lets one do postmortem logs of dps?

Thus far there is no combat log at all which is really a pain.. I've put a lot of time into trying to talk to each DPS for my Operations. I can get a rough "idea" on if they're DPSing correctly, if they know the mechanics, proper resource management ect ect. Then try to get them to 'mentor' someone else.

There is one particular fight in Eternity Vault that is literally a 1 player vs. 1 boss duel. I stick myself on the glass cannon that 3 shots people with his special hit if you can't drop him super quick. Luckily since I'm usually done in the first 15 seconds it lets me run around and watch members do their 1v1.. There are always "repeats" of say 3x Spec A Marauders so I'll have all 3 gunslingers assigned to fight them and it lets me compare the players vs. eachother.

That fight alone has resulted in a handful of respecs and "Rotation changes" for the good of the group.

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Kelaan wrote:So, now that Star Wars: TOR has been out for a while, would you guys care to share what you like and dislike about it? Obviously you enjoy it enough to play that instead of WoW.

[*]What does SWTOR do better than WoW? What does it have that WoW is missing, or does poorly? I know some of you will say "no pandas" but as pandas don't seem to bother me, I'm looking for something more.

The leveling experience for me was more enjoyable than WoW. This can mainly be attributed to the voice acting and the class quests. In many ways, the quests were actually far worse than the variety offered by WoW, and the phasing compared to WoW is also way more primitive. Your character having a voice, though, goes a long way.

Kelaan wrote:[*]What do you dislike about SWTOR? What are your biggest gripes? (And are these things which WoW does better, or is it something both do poorly at?)

The PvE endgame is an absolute disaster. It is just embarrassingly terrible. Gripes basically include:(1) No reason to do HM Flashpoints, since normal mode Operations are so much easier.(2) The normal mode loot system assigns loot to players and will do things like give two tank trinkets to DPS while the tank gets a DPS belt. It's just stupid. No way for non-PuG groups to turn this automatic assigning off.(3) Hard Modes are just DPS checks. The mechanics of the fights are all so trivial that everything just boils down to a DPS check. Once you can meet it, you beat the Hard Mode.(4) There is no reason to do Nightmare Mode. It drops the same loot as Hard Mode (supposedly it should drop slightly more Rakata gear, but in practice it doesn't).(5) The Rakata gear is only 4 ilvls above the Columi gear. It is often poorly itemized compared to Columi, forcing you to mod hunt for mods from other classes' Rakata gear in order to fix the itemization problems in your own gear. There is little incentive to even acquire Rakata, given that it only makes you 5-10% better than Columi.(6) Tons of raid bugs. Bugs with loot (don't turn on Master Looter!), huge bugs in Soa. They keep making Soa worse with each patch.

It doesn't bother me that much that the PvE content in this game is a joke, but there are so many dumb oversights that I have little faith that they're ever going to have a competitive PvE endgame.

I'm also very disappointed in class balance. For example, sorcerers/sages are just flat out better healers than the other two classes. Tank cooldowns aren't balanced. These differences don't matter that much since the content isn't hard, but if they ever do make difficult content, then balance will be more of an issue.

Kelaan wrote:[*]Do you play both WoW and SWTOR? (Or, if you have a wow subscription, is it only for D3 plus beta access to pandas?)

I play both WoW and SWTOR.

Kelaan wrote:[*]Did you swap to SWTOR because you had "finished" Cataclysm, or because the game just does a lot of things better? (if it does)

Just looking for something to play on WoW off nights.

Kelaan wrote:[*]If you PvP, what do you like better about the pvp than wow's? Aside from Huttball (which I admit seems a bit more fun than CTF), is there anything else? Is there an equivalent to arenas, or is it all larger group combat?

Kihra wrote:(3) Hard Modes are just DPS checks. The mechanics of the fights are all so trivial that everything just boils down to a DPS check. Once you can meet it, you beat the Hard Mode.(4) There is no reason to do Nightmare Mode. It drops the same loot as Hard Mode (supposedly it should drop slightly more Rakata gear, but in practice it doesn't).

The only LOOT difference between Hardmode & Nightmare that we've found is that if you complete 5/5 bosses on Nightmare within 2 hours you will be awarded a title & a bonus loot chest with 1 to 3 "epic" mounts.

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What does SWTOR do better than WoW? What does it have that WoW is missing, or does poorly? I know some of you will say "no pandas" but as pandas don't seem to bother me, I'm looking for something more.

Story telling. Having spoken conversations with NPC's is a great change. It does get tedious doing them a 2nd and 3rd time with alts but at least you can skip them for the most part.

What do you dislike about SWTOR? What are your biggest gripes? (And are these things which WoW does better, or is it something both do poorly at?)

Non customizable UI. Terrible trade network. Poor end game content. I'm not too terribly concerned for the latter since it is a fairly new game and all that stuff will slowly get added over time.

Do you play both WoW and SWTOR? (Or, if you have a wow subscription, is it only for D3 plus beta access to pandas?)

I only play SWTOR.

Did you swap to SWTOR because you had "finished" Cataclysm, or because the game just does a lot of things better? (if it does)

I stopped playing WoW back at the start of summer last year. We raided firelands one time and I was done. I had a great time in WoW, I was just "done" with the game.

If you PvP, what do you like better about the pvp than wow's? Aside from Huttball (which I admit seems a bit more fun than CTF), is there anything else? Is there an equivalent to arenas, or is it all larger group combat?

I've been pvping a bit more lately in the sub-50's bracket. The fun pvp action is really to be had pre-50. The matches feel a bit more balanced. There doesn't feel like there are any 1 on 1 situations where you just get stunned/smoked in 5 seconds (Unless you're a fresh level 11 without your damage reduction abilities going against a much higher level). I actually really love Voidstar but that is not surprising since my favorite BG in WoW was Strand of the Ancients.

I realize this is a very small sample size, but is server balance completely hosed? Last I'd heard, it sounded like Republic was outnumbered by a large margin, which makes a pvp server (or a pvp zone) sound very daunting.

My server is very Empire heavy. There seems to be a small but active pvp community on the Republic side. It really feels kinda like playing Horde in BG's years ago. I win a majority of my Warzones since I've started playing them regularly. The only one I seem to lose basically all the time is Huttball but thankfully I don't get that one too often. I probably lose cause I don't play it often enough to really understand what is going on. Pass the ball, don't stand in the bad, yadda blah. I have not tried to do any of the Ilum stuff since the change. The few times I was out there doing PvE dailies, I saw in general chat about kill trading. Empire was pretty cool at allowing the Republic get their daily done the old way so I imagine they are being cool allowing the Republic getting it done the new way too. It kinda defeats the purpose of PvP but it is a shitty system and if that is how you gotta work it, then by all means.

Kelaan wrote:So, now that Star Wars: TOR has been out for a while, would you guys care to share what you like and dislike about it? Obviously you enjoy it enough to play that instead of WoW.

What does SWTOR do better than WoW? What does it have that WoW is missing, or does poorly? I know some of you will say "no pandas" but as pandas don't seem to bother me, I'm looking for something more.

First and foremost the story. SWTOR is a story based and story driven MMO and it's great. There's no need to read a whole bunch of text in a small box to the side of the screen, filled with irrelevant or circumstantial information like in WoW. You actually go and talk to the NPC, who engages in actual conversation with you. Various possible responses add flavor to the conversation, and chosing not to accept the mission is more than just pressing escape (when the [Refuse Mission] is an option).

What do you dislike about SWTOR? What are your biggest gripes? (And are these things which WoW does better, or is it something both do poorly at?)

Mostly the lack of macros. Also the (current) lack of warzone brackets. I know any character of lvl 48 or lower has his/her stats raised to 49, but this hardly compensates for the lack abilities (eg a lvl 10 char), nor for the fact that although dmg, attributes, etc are raised, you still use the lower rank abilities and these are not artificially raised to lvl 49.

Do you play both WoW and SWTOR? (Or, if you have a wow subscription, is it only for D3 plus beta access to pandas?)

Logged onto WoW once after I started playing SWTOR.

Did you swap to SWTOR because you had "finished" Cataclysm, or because the game just does a lot of things better? (if it does)

A little bit of both. I killed Deathwing with a pure PuG a couple of days before my early access of SWTOR came, and that was a signal that I was done with WoW (at least until Panda). I could've stuck around to do heroic mode, but I've never been that much into hardmodes, and once I started SWTOR I didn't really look back.

If you PvP, what do you like better about the pvp than wow's? Aside from Huttball (which I admit seems a bit more fun than CTF), is there anything else? Is there an equivalent to arenas, or is it all larger group combat?

For some strange reason I like PvP more in SWTOR than I used to in WoW (except from my time I played my hunter twink, which was just WTFROFLSTOMP), perhaps because my Vanguard Tank (my main) is actually useful and contributing where my Tankadin wasn't.

I realize this is a very small sample size, but is server balance completely hosed? Last I'd heard, it sounded like Republic was outnumbered by a large margin, which makes a pvp server (or a pvp zone) sound very daunting.

I play Republic on The Progenitor (EU RP-PVE), and Imperial as on Lord Calypho (EU RP-PVP), and I can't really say that on Lord Calypho I encounter more same faction oppenents than on The Progenitor... Perhaps this is because they are both RP servers and the difference is much more noticable on regular PVP servers...

What does SWTOR do better than WoW? What does it have that WoW is missing, or does poorly? I know some of you will say "no pandas" but as pandas don't seem to bother me, I'm looking for something more.

The class stories are great. I love that my characters talk and each have their own personality.

It seems like it would be a great game for two people to play together since you could see each other's class quests and do all the heroic 2 missions.

I really like the companions. Well at least the ones that speak english.

What do you dislike about SWTOR? What are your biggest gripes? (And are these things which WoW does better, or is it something both do poorly at?)

The sith empire resembles the original empire way too much. The republic ships looking like Princess Leia's blockade runner is fitting, but the star destroyers and tie fighters are rediculus. There's countless examples of technology more advanced than you see in the orignal movies. Like all the personal shields, smuggler/operative portal shield screens, etc. Several quest stories talk about some variety of super weapon that gives the death star a run for its money. Troppers and smugglers can take on sith? Give me a break. I know they have to balance the classes, but they should have at least put in some story about how the lightsaber technique of deflecting blaster fire was only at a rudimentary level at this time period or something. And that lightsaber tech was much weaker back then or something to explain why it takes more than 1 direct hit to kill something.

The worst part about SWOTR for me was the gameplay. Each class I tried just seemed clunky. When I first rolled a tropper I kept jumping around and running like it was a 3rd person shooter for the first few levels until I realized it was pointless.

Cover makes sense logically and fits when a gunslinger is under fire. But why do I have to duck if noone is shooting at me? When it looks like you'll roll into that nice spot there, you instead end up rolling right into the middle of a pack of baddies. Ugh.

Some of tropper tanks best moves are melee range? Really? Why do I carry this huge-ass gun then? The idea of a range tank seemed like it would be an interesting change of gameplay from anything wow had until you relize you need to be in melee range.

Commando / Scoundrel healing seemed interesting but I've lost interest in trying it after reading so many complaints about it.

I find it ironic that a lightsaber is just a stat stick for my sage. If anything gets in melee range, I'm better off stunning them and giving them a roundhouse kick in the head instead of actually trying to hit them with this glowing stick that's supposed to be able to slice off limbs lickety-split.

Some of the light/dark choices are really good, but most of them are fail. A lot of the options don't really fit at all and seem like they were only included because they wanted to have 3 options.

The non-class stories are rather ho-hum. Yeah the cut scenes and voice acting are nice, but too many of the quests just don't fit in very well. You'll be on a super "urgent" class mission and some side quest will be about taking soil samples. heh. It's hard to resist spacebaring through these. A lot of people complained about the linearity of quests in Caty, but I actually liked that this let them give each zone one larger primary story.

The thing that killed the questing for me was that they only have a handful of rather rudimentary quest mechanics.1. Kill x2. Loot x3. Click on object object x4. Use item in your mission inventory5. Go talk to x(I maybe missed something)

I know WoW only had a few mission tools at release too, but apart from the voice acting, I find Catacylsm's and WotLK's quests were much better. Having a quest once in a while to use a catapult to fend off an invading army (deepholm) or fly on the back of a dragon helped shake things up. In SWoTR when I get to a new planet, after looking at the new scenery it always seems like, "here we go again..."

The space missions are a missed oportunity. Instead of dailies, it would have been much better to integrate them into the class stories. I guess make them easy enough that noone gets frustrated and keep the hard ones as optional level 50 dailies.

Either stuff is too spread out or the mounts aren't fast enough. Take your pick.

The custom gear is a great idea in theory. In practice it's a bit annoying to poke through each piece and try to figure out if I should use my commendations on enhancement x for my helm or armor mod for my companion's chest.

Crafting is a mess. If the goal is to just make your own gear and not really sell too much on the GTN, then the missions are too expensive and time consuming just to make leveling gear (especially the blue and purple stuff). If the goal is to be able to be a crafter and make stuff to sell, then the limit of being able to only post 50 items on the GTN makes no sense.

Then end of each planet tends to feel pretty easy and then when you move to the next planet you get kicked in the butt and realise, Oh I guess I should have probably tried to figure out how to upgrade some gear. Wow did a much better job of divying up green quest rewards to keep you rolling without having to hike back to the AH / GTN and pray some upgrades are for sale at resonable prices.

Having two chars (yourself and at least one companion) makes this worse. Good luck trying to keep more than one companion's gear up to date. Troopers at least get the break of 4 of the companions using the same gear as you.

No click casting for healers is so 1999.

No LFD or LFR combined with low server pops is a killer. There are so many HEROIC 2 and HEROIC 4 quests that go wasted because it's a pain to put together a group and if you do manage to, the travel to get there takes too long. At least WoW had the foresight to put in summoning stones before LFD. Taken together, there isn't really any point to trying to do them if you're just trying to level up. No dual-spec makes this worse with few tanks and healers. On WoW, I can hop on and run a dungeon in 30ish minutes. Good luck trying to do that in SWOTR apart from WZs. If there were 100-200 people on a planet instead of 10-20, I could see no LFG working out, but as it is, the world just seems very very empty.

Do you play both WoW and SWTOR? (Or, if you have a wow subscription, is it only for D3 plus beta access to pandas?)

I didn't play WoW hardly at all for the first 6 or so weeks since getting SWOTR. Now, I mostly just log into SWOTR to try to get my sage to 50 before my subscription runs out in a couple weeks.

Did you swap to SWTOR because you had "finished" Cataclysm, or because the game just does a lot of things better? (if it does)

I love star wars and was really looking forward to playing SWTOR but I've pretty much switched back to WoW at this point.

If you PvP, what do you like better about the pvp than wow's? Aside from Huttball (which I admit seems a bit more fun than CTF), is there anything else? Is there an equivalent to arenas, or is it all larger group combat?

There are too many interrupts, cc's, knockbacks, etc in SWOTR for it to be fun for me. I gave up on pvp after a few WZs.

I realize this is a very small sample size, but is server balance completely hosed? Last I'd heard, it sounded like Republic was outnumbered by a large margin, which makes a pvp server (or a pvp zone) sound very daunting.

Somewhere I read that overall it was 57% empire and 43% republic. The fundamental problem with the idea of MMO world PvP is how do you get the losing side to keep showing up? Eventually they just stop playing, server transfer, or re-roll to the wining side. People in my guild in DAoC started playing their Abilon alts more and more until our orginal Midguard setup was all crickets. WoW at least was somewhat sucessful in realizing this paradigm in their design of the WoTLK (scaling player power) and Caty (fixed team size) pvp world zones. Putting these things on a timer of every x hours helps a lot verus trying to doing something ongoing. That Bioware spent 300 million and all they could come up with is empire camping the republic base in Illum is rediculus considering it was entirely predictable.

All in all, it was fun for while but just lost its lustre. I'll probably give SWOTR another go after there's been time for them to polish things up.

Aanar wrote:Troppers and smugglers can take on sith? Give me a break. I know they have to balance the classes, but they should have at least put in some story about how the lightsaber technique of deflecting blaster fire was only at a rudimentary level at this time period or something. And that lightsaber tech was much weaker back then or something to explain why it takes more than 1 direct hit to kill something.

You do know that your main opponents aren't exactly at Vader or Yoda powerlevels, right?

Really starting to miss addons like Tidyplates in this game. Not to mention my quickslots are horribly cluttered. I have to use 1 through - and Shift+1 through like Shift+8 to have all the abilities I use while tanking. And that's not even counting tanking cooldowns and medpacks, which I have on the right side bar. Also really disliking the lack of any kind of AoE threat. I'm not talking Cataclysm level joke threat, I'm talking TBC or Wrath level stuff.

The AOE looting and some of the stuff lifted by the NDA for Pandaclysm might be enough to sway me back to WoW... probably right in time for the launch event.

Tidyplates IS powerful. I would miss it heavily. Do you still enjoy playing the game in general, though? After seeing the Duel of the Fates fight on the big screen this past weekend, I definitely felt a pang of regret that I hadn't tried SW:TOR, even if I still think extremely highly of WoW (and am excited by the Pandaclysm media event info).

I like it, and I continue to dally with it when I'm not replaying through Mass Effect 1(Almost done, then back to 2 and 3 again) as a Renegade FemShep, which is the first time I've done either with ME. I hit 50 with my Juggernaut and like it, but don't like AOE tanking in the game. It's unbelievably weak. Even single target threat isn't that good, and I'm mostly decked out in normal mode epics from operations/raids at this point.

I have an Assassin I am leveling and he's stuck around 30, problem being that I already saw the story when my wife leveled up her Sorcerer with me. So I'm not in a huge rush to play it. But I don't much feel compelled to play a Bounty Hunter or Agent atm. The main issue is I don't feel compelled to play mostly the same grind another 6-7 times to see all the class stories, and the end game isn't there. Plus my RL is kicking me in the butt and making me unreliable for raid times right now, though I do hope by the time of Pandaclysm to go back into WoW and play with some friends who are in a semi-hardcore guild and do 10s or something.

R29 bounty hunter, started sunday. really like it, playing light side. Putting in ticket though, as why I'm getting a hatemail from Juda is really confusing. I have no idea why she hates me. Or that her mom had gambling debts.

Personally I disliked Mako cause she was totally at odds with how I wanted to play my character. I'm a bounty hunter for corn's sake. I should be a bit of a hard ass, not some fru-fru pretend hunter in touch with everyone's feelings.

I ended my subscription. I enjoyed leveling to 50 (once) and then I was done. I like the list of stuff they are adding in the future but for me it is just too late. I didn't expect all that stuff to come out in a rush of course. Things take time. By the time they've released more stuff I'd be interested in doing, I'll have moved on to something different.

I honestly am curious about the state of the game internally. Of everyone I played with during release (15-20 people) all but 1 have quit. I'd love to be a fly on the wall during those meetings.

Gracerath wrote:I honestly am curious about the state of the game internally. Of everyone I played with during release (15-20 people) all but 1 have quit. I'd love to be a fly on the wall during those meetings.

This. Never got into it myself, but all of the WOW crowd that I know who played have already quit.

Gracerath wrote:I honestly am curious about the state of the game internally. Of everyone I played with during release (15-20 people) all but 1 have quit. I'd love to be a fly on the wall during those meetings.

This. Never got into it myself, but all of the WOW crowd that I know who played have already quit.

Just another Rift/Aion/AoC etc...

I see the opposite, more and more of the people I know from WoW are letting subscriptions drop and starting Star Wars.

Anecdotal information is anecdotal

"Definition: Love is making a connection with another person against long odds." "Clarification: Love is making a shot to the knees of a target 300 kilometers away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope."-HK-47WoW Millionaire

sahiel wrote:I see the opposite, more and more of the people I know from WoW are letting subscriptions drop and starting Star Wars.

Anecdotal information is anecdotal

Definitely, it probably also has something to with the type of gamers a person associates with in WoW.

The people I'm talking about switched to SW with the intent of raiding. They leveled to 50, downed the content and have since quit. I'm sure there's people leaving WoW everyday for SW. Just think it would be interesting to see the numbers and trends from SW subs.

Last I heard they were nearing 2 million but that was in early February.

Weird, that's the exact same people I see switching heh. Most all of them were raiders who were either 8/8 normal or into heroics and are all switching to raiding in Swtor, much like most raiders in WoW you don't quit just cause you killed a boss once, so they're all having fun gearing up and doing Nightmare modes in the Swtor Ops (which imo are a lot of fun!). Either way, the game seems to be doing well it's all good

"Definition: Love is making a connection with another person against long odds." "Clarification: Love is making a shot to the knees of a target 300 kilometers away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope."-HK-47WoW Millionaire

If that were the case, I'd probably still login every now and then. Nothing wrong with the game really, it has its plus and minuses. I stopped playing for the same reasons I stopped playing wow. End game requires more time than I'm willing to invest. I did thoroughly enjoy leveling though.